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Keith Carlson
Naperville Central High School
Naperville, Ill.
Title
Learning to ask questions before learning how to ask questions
Overview and Rationale
Best practice classroom instruction is starting to chip away at the notion that students are in school only to answer questions. But because this is still standard practice in many disciplines, journalism teachers might notice some spill-over in their classrooms, with students feeling comfortable looking for answers but not knowing how to ask questions.
As journalism teachers, we often incorporate lessons early on to teach our budding reporters how to ask questions when they are interviewing sources. But shouldnt we get them comfortable asking questions of all kinds without fear of judgment before we start telling them how to ask questions and which questions to ask?
Novice journalists are frequently weak when it comes to formulating the right questions for a given interview. They arent as concerned with what theyre getting so much as they are with what theyre doing. So they prepare a few questions, jot down the answers, and frequently return to class with a small amount of succinct information and, far too often, not much potential for good quotes in their eventual stories.
In many English classes (including those with a journalism focus), when students learn the difference between open-ended and closed-ended questions, teachers lead students to believe that open-ended questions have less value that closed-ended questions. This is a mistake in the sense that its not that simple.
The goal of this lesson is to take the concept of student-centered learning and apply it to the teaching of and preparation for the interview process. The lesson uses a method called the Question Formulation Technique, or QFT, a technique documented by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana in their 2011 book, Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions, and explored on its companion website, The Right Question Institute (rightquestion.org). Through concentrated focus on just the questions, students will learn to be better prepared for interviews and, as a result, will leave those interviews with stronger material, which should translate to stronger stories.
Though this lesson could be used at any time, its designed to be used BEFORE teaching specific journalistic techniques, so that students can really grapple with the nature of good questions before being instructed by an expert in any way, and before theyre told by someone else what constitutes a good question or a bad one. If you do this before you teach interviewing, youll have students thinking about how they ask questions throughout that process, and hopefully, this will pay off!
Goals for Understanding
Upon completion of this activity, students should have a sense of the usefulness of the collaborative process of asking questions: how it both inspires story ideas and prepares a journalist for interviews. This lesson will prepare the journalism student for a more concentrated focus on the tactics required for getting good quotes and conducting solid interviews.
Essential Questions
Why is it important to ask a lot of questions?
How can one determine the value or the quality of a question?
What is the relationship between asking questions and preparing to collect source material for writing a story?
How does a collaborative questioning process contribute to the discovery of more varied potential story angles and possible interview sources?
Critical Engagement Questions
How do my own personal opinions and areas of knowledge interfere with a collaborative questioning environment?
How does a student-led process of questioning impact engagement in learning and preparation for the next steps?
How do I decide whether an open-ended or closed-ended question is best to use in a given situation?
How do I determine what makes a question a good question?
How can I use peer collaboration to prepare for conducting an interview?
Overviews and Timeline
There are many excellent resources available for teaching student journalists how to ask good questions and properly prepare for successful interviews. One of my favorites is the 21 Question Formula, a strategy I first learned from adviser Aaron Manfull at a national convention, and one he included in Student Journalism & Media Literacy, a journalism textbook he coauthored with Megan Fromm and Homer L. Hall. (Ive provided an electronic link to this resource later in this lesson plan.)
The Question Formulation Technique has six steps but is easily adaptable. The steps are:
Design a question focus
Produce questions
Work with open-ended and closed-ended questions
Prioritize questions
Plan next steps
Reflect
Step one should be fairly easy and is teacher-driven. What do you want students to be asking questions about? For this purpose, it is recommended that you put students into small groups of 3-6 and provide each group with a news story topic (something hypothetical but still realistic, or maybe actual story topics to be used in your publications). The question focus should be open-ended. Some examples would include: school vending machines, blood drive, girls soccer team, drama club, etc. (Basically, you want to remove the journalistic element of the angle and just give the topic let the students discover the angle for themselves!) Students need not know anything about their topics prior to receiving them!
Steps two through four will happen during your day one lesson. The remaining two steps can be addressed during subsequent class periods and activities.
Here is a link to a quick version of the day one activity that I put together for the 2015 Reynolds Institute held at ASU: HYPERLINK "http://tinyurl.com/p8q84j7" http://tinyurl.com/p8q84j7
Activity 1: Teach and implement the Question Formulation Technique (One 45-minute class period)
Begin class by emphasizing that the period is going to be all about the asking of questions and not about the answering of questions. To do this, project on your screen or write on your board the following ground rules for the group activity:
Ask as many questions as you can.
Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any questions.
Write down every question exactly as it is stated.
Change any statement into a question.
Have a conversation about these rules as a class. Which rules will be the hardest to follow? Why? Etc. Let students know that during the question generating time, you will simply be enforcing the four rules and cannot assist them in any way. They should also police themselves from violating any of these rules.
Once students are ready, provide them with a time limit, their Q-Focus (topic) and have them go! Circulate the room to enforce the rules, which should be kept in view of the class as they are working. Because you want groups to keep on task, dont make the time limit too long. Somewhere in the eight-minute range should work. Use your judgment.
Take a moment to debrief that process as a large group. How hard was it to follow the rules? Then, lead a quick discussion about what an open-ended question is and what a closed-ended question is. Talk about how journalists might best put each kind of question to use and/or which circumstances might merit which kinds of questions. Be careful not to impose values on either kind of question let students do that for themselves.
Ask groups to mark every question as open-ended (O) or closed-ended (C). (You might find it interesting that some students will struggle with certain questions and see them as both.) Once theyve been given time to do this, ask them to practice rewriting a few of the open-ended questions as closed-ended, and vice-versa.
For the last part of the day one activity, have groups identify their best three questions that came up during the brainstorming session. Let each group wrestle with what best means. The criteria for determining best is something you can talk about later. It is important that a consensus is reached on each question.
Each group should submit their three questions as an exit ticket from class. You can collect this on paper or electronically as you choose. If groups worked with different Q-Focus statements, make sure they include these as well. If you have extra time, you could also ask each group to present their questions to the class. In addition to these priority questions, you should also collect each groups raw questions from their brainstorming session.
Activity 2: Processing the QFT activity and connecting it to the preparation for an interview (One 45-minute class period)
Ask students to return to their groups from the day before, and provide each group with their priority questions as well as their raw questions. Begin class by leading students through a brief discussion about how they determined which questions were their best.
Next, ask each group to identify the best potential sources for each question. Challenge them to be specific. For example, instead of just saying I would ask this of a student, push them to define attributes of the kind of student who might be a good potential source. Require them to include names of building staff sources, not just job titles. They might have to ask other students in class or consult yearbooks or school websites or materials for this information.
Now students have three questions they believe are good questions, and a list of possible sources. At this time, use the remainder of class to guide students through your technique of choice in teaching how to prepare for an interview. As yesterday was student-driven, this is obviously more teacher-driven. You can either ask students to read the section on interviewing in the journalism text in your classroom or provide them with whatever electronic resources you normally use.
If youre using a strategy like the 21 Questions Formula, see if student groups can identify whether or not any of their other questions not selected as the three best might still be viable or useful questions in the interview. This will also be a good segue into discussing the warm-up kinds of questions that would have never come up during the QFT activity, such as asking someone to spell their name. These questions and tasks are critical to the journalism process, too.
Heres a link to the 21 Questions Formula from Aaron Manfulls site, The Next 26:
HYPERLINK "http://thenext26.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/interview-questions.pdf" http://thenext26.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/interview-questions.pdf
At your discretion, you will also want to lead a conversation about how to select the best quotes from interview notes to include in a story. For students new to reporting, this conversation might be confusing if it happens before students have conducted their first interviews.
Assessment
By and large, the Question Formulation Technique activity is a formative assessment activity, with the flexibility for summative assessment in the completion of the final two tasks of planning next steps and reflecting. Here are a few potential next steps, any of which could become assessments:
If groups were given actual topics for student publications as their Q-Focus topics, the natural next step is to continue in the story writing process. Because questions were generated in groups, this technique is particularly useful for package assignments, such as multimedia stories and feature spreads. The final product obviously becomes the work youll assess.
If Q-Focus topics were hypothetical, you can conduct a more simplified and less formal version of this process right after your normal brainstorming sessions and when stories are assigned. Until students become more seasoned reporters, have them working with others to generate potential interview questions in a situation like this one. Over time, theyll be able to generate quality questions without the help of others. You might also find that hypothetical topics become real ones when the brainstorming session was fruitful.
Have students journal about the Q-Focus experience. Topics could include group dynamics, following the four rules, and so on.
Once armed with questions and possible sources, you can guide students to next consider things like story angles, potential photos, best ways to present or tell the story, and so on. A what would you do with this journal prompt might yield some interesting insight into what students are thinking.
Consider asking students to use internet resources to see if any of their questions have been answered in other ways, at other times, by other sources, etc. In this way, they can continue to evaluate the quality of their own questions.
References
Fromm, Megan, Homer L. Hall, and Aaron Manfull. Student Journalism & Media Literacy. New
York, NY: Rosen Publishing, 2015. Print.
Right Question Institute - A Catalyst For Microdemocracy. Right Question Institute. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.
Rothstein, Dan, and Luz Santana. Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2011. Print.
The Next 26. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.
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